The present invention relates generally to the field of integrated circuits, and more particularly to energy conservation when processing network traffic.
Performance coupled with energy consumption and efficiency are important topics when considering a network traffic processing architecture. big.LITTLE™ is a System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture that combines the usage of a pair of processors on a single chip. The larger processor (i.e., big) is a powerful processor for handling high peaks and high volume traffic. The second, a smaller processor (i.e., LITTLE), is a lower power processor for processing lower volume traffic. When the SoC is performing networking operations, the integrated circuit may also be referred to as a Network-on-a-Chip (NoC). What is needed are methods for switching between the larger and smaller processors that conserves energy, particularly when processing variable network traffic.